Evidence Hints Demjanjuk Is Not `Ivan The Terrible' -- Papers From Soviet Union Suggest Mistaken Identity

JERUSALEM - The trial was long, highly publicized and emotional, the verdict strident and decisive.

On April 18, 1988, a three-judge Israeli court found John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former autoworker from Cleveland, guilty of being "Ivan the Terrible," the sadistic executioner at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka. He was sentenced to death.

Demjanjuk, 71, is still awaiting execution in an Israeli prison. Forty-three months after that sensational judgment, however, the country's legal authorities are quietly grappling with what appears to be a deeply embarrassing problem: Compelling new evidence, discovered in the Soviet Union a year ago, suggests that Israel may have extradited, tried and convicted the wrong man.

"We are talking about one of the worst mistakes in the legal history of the world as far as mistaken identity," claims Yoram Sheftel, the Israeli lawyer who has relentlessly pressed Demjanjuk's appeal.

Demjanjuk, stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 after an investigation by the Justice Department and extradited to Israel in 1986, has always insisted he was the victim of mistaken identity. In a series of trials and appeals in the United States and Israel, however, his arguments were rejected.

Even today, strong evidence indicates Demjanjuk was a Soviet Red Army soldier in World War II who was recruited to be a watchman, or Nazi camp guard, after being taken prisoner, and that he spent time at Trawniki, a training camp for guards, and the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

After the war, he obtained admission to the United States by lying on his visa application, according to testimony at his trials.

Now, however, Demjanjuk's defenders argue they have overwhelming proof that, whatever his record during the Nazis' extermination of European Jewry, he was not the savage operator of the gas chambers, whom prisoners at Treblinka called Ivan the Terrible.

The testimony, obtained by the Israeli prosecutors in March and submitted to the Supreme Court in August, consists of 21 statements by former guards at Treblinka, a camp in eastern Poland where the Nazis killed at least 900,000 Jews.

The guards, who were interrogated by the Soviet KGB, then tried and convicted of war crimes, all identified Ivan the Terrible as being a Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko - a man whose appearance, age, birthplace, war record and eventual fate all differ substantially from Demjanjuk's.

Nowhere in any of the statements, taken between 1944 and 1961, does the name Demjanjuk appear.

The guards said the German army captured Marchenko in the summer of 1941; Demjanjuk was captured in May 1942. The newly presented testimony places Marchenko at Treblink continuously from July 1942 to the fall of 1943, but the prosecution argued that Demjanjuk was at Treblinka only from August 1942 until August 1943, and spent some of that time at Sobibor.

There is also a photograph in which a guard identified one man as Marchenko. The man clearly is not Demjanjuk, his lawyers argue.

No documents have ever connected Demjanjuk to Treblinka. He was convicted by the Israeli court on the basis of a German identity card and from testimony by five survivors of the Treblinka camp.

The new evidence, the defense argues, overwhelms this chain of proof.

There is one obvious flaw in Demjanjuk's new defense. When applying for a U.S. visa at Stuttgart, Germany, in 1948, he gave his mother's maiden name as Marchenko. That fact led the prosecution to charge in a hearing last year that Demjanjuk and Marchenko are the same person, and that Demjanjuk used his mother's name as an alias.

Sheftel now claims to have knocked down that argument, producing documents showing that Demjanjuk's mother's name was Tabachuk. When applying for his visa, the defense argues, Demjanjuk could not remember his mother's maiden name and put down Marchenko, a common Ukrainian name.

The chief prosecutor of Demjanjuk, Michael Shaked, did not attempt to refute the Marchenko identification in arguments before the Supreme Court in August. But he did claim that even if Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, he would still be guilty of war crimes for acts at Trawniki and Sobibor.

"There is no moral difference," he told the judges.

One Supreme Court judge, Eliezar Goldberg, pounced on the remark. "You are turning your attention to Sobibor and Trawniki," he said. "What about Treblinka?"

Shaked answered only, "I will deal with Treblinka later."